Those are the top 10 tags by closed questions in amount (in percentage, there are some places 150%, but that is a bug in the query)

The percentage varies, so ignore that. The important part is the insane amount of closed questions. The top 10 tags (by closed questions) have about 216 000 closed questions total. Stack Overflow has 14 million questions. So while 216000 closed questions total may sound like little, how many questions are closed every day.

The main site (not meta) has over 10000 questions in the close vote review queue. Assuming all those questions were closed by 5 people, that requires 50 000 close votes to close. That is 1000 people reviewing 50 questions and no questions being added. (Closing outside the queue from places like Close Vote reviewers in chat)

Stack Overflow has come to the point where traffic is insane, there are insane amounts of questions and answers being written, and a way to big amount is closed.

Here are links to three really good and useful features that were never handled (not accepted, not approved)

None of these were implemented, and we need them desperately. 8-9% of questions are closed, there aren't enough reviewers to process them all.

And sure, I could argue "we need to lower the close vote review queue limit" or "we need more close votes" but there is no point in that if it has to be done every once in a while because there are so many new, bad questions being posted it cannot be handled.

So instead, I post this post today arguing we need to improve quality. I have tagged this post with discussion and feature-request because my suggestions may not be insightful enough, or they may be too hard to implement.

Some of my suggestions:

Checklist

Staging area

Question analyzer for new users (probably AI based/machine learning) to help them improve their questions

What are your suggestions?

We need features like this (one, some or all) to help take a load off the close vote review queue. And please, add some features like this. Helping the user ask better questions benefits Stack Overflow (high quality content, brings traffic) and the asker (gets an answer).

The argument could be made that not enough questions are actually being closed, and getting lost in space.
– silencedmessageAug 3 '17 at 16:24

4

There are a lot of other questions I would like to see closed too. Given the 10000 votes in the review queue now and the on average 800 questions closed per day, there are simply not enough reviewers. Statistical disclaimer though: Some closed are deleted, so the statistics may be off. Still, roughly 800 questions per day are closed. Compared to traffic, there aren't enough closed per day. We either need more reviewers, votes or less questions there is a need to close
– ZoeAug 3 '17 at 16:27

Agreed 100%. Just wanted to point out that these numbers are even lower then they should be. I agree something needs to be done. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have any ideas better than many of those that have been proposed. The DAG team asked for input on their priority, and the response overwhelmingly supports question quality: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/354127/3033053 The majority of SO users know something needs to be done.
– silencedmessageAug 3 '17 at 16:30

1

The majority knows that. Yet, the SO team doesn't implement any of the feature requests on this topic. There are a lot of feature requests for it, and I hope that comes to an end with this question. Meaning I hope they actually start implementing measures, because closing 800 questions per day is viable if 400 come in per day, as we need to empty the close vote review queue. The stats on closed questions are slightly off, because of single-handed dupe closing and deleted questions. Taking that into account though, it is still not enough. We would need twice given the current amount
– ZoeAug 3 '17 at 16:33

of questions asked every day. Or we could add measures to lower the amounts of questions asked that needs to be closed. I guess there may be more every day that needs closing too, but there are only so many close votes we can hand out
– ZoeAug 3 '17 at 16:34

2

Your stats seem about right... For June, there were 266,945 questions asked of which 216,389 remain undeleted and of those 9,404 which are closed...
– Jon Clements♦Aug 3 '17 at 16:36

3

Saying, "we need to improve question quality" isn't really helpful. It's been one of the primary goals of the site since it's inception. There are hundreds of thousands of questions on meta (if you span the meta sites) about how to improve question quality. If you have a specific proposal, then write up that proposal, but as it is, there isn't really anything to discuss here. If someone else comes up with their own proposal on how to improve question quality they should write it up as a new question, not comment or answer here with it.
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 17:25

1 Answer
1

It's obviously not a popular view, but I don't think questions need to be closed by people. We should let time do its job and good questions will naturally rise and bad questions will naturally be forgotten.

Pearls will shine by themselves; you don't need to remove all the sand manually.

This is the attitude that all of SO's predecessors took for their questions. A big part of SO's mission, and how it differentiated itself from those competitors, was that it didn't just accept bad questions.
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 17:22

2

@Servy I kinda doubt it was the deciding factor. What was the statistic again for the traffic to SO? Something like 99% come from google search? The point is that google does all the filtering for you so what is the point of using all this man power to fight the losing battle of closing questions when it's an automatic process?
– GudradainAug 3 '17 at 17:33

12

And the reason that google directs so much traffic to SO is because of how hard SO works to improve question quality. If SO didn't spend so much time and effort ensuring posts were of high quality, then the quality of the content would be lower, and Google wouldn't be directing nearly as much traffic to the site. If the quality control mechanisms don't do anything then all of those other sites that don't have quality controls would have Google directing tons of traffic to them, instead of SO.
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 17:35

yes google, because the search box up in SO's page is ... i won't say useless, but not consistent at all. And i heard it is not about to be improved, so of course, SO starts with a google search. And as the main goal here is to remove the bad questions, it's even better to me, it's CLEAN in here (well they work on it hard)
– Antoine PelletierAug 3 '17 at 17:38

@Servy Showing quality content to google is indeed important but I don't believe an army of users closing questions is the right way to achieve it. We already have automatic deletion of question after a few days for example. Also, we could chose to only show google posts that have a few up votes if the aim to only show quality content.
– GudradainAug 3 '17 at 17:48

2

@Gudradain Then you have, for all intents and purposes, just delete every single niche topic on the site, and ensured that SO is only useful for extremely widely used topics, which is against it's design. It's here to cover the long tail of programming questions. Many of good questions and answers in niche topics don't get more than one upvote, because there's just so little traffic.
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 17:52

1

@Gudradain Additionally, in your model it's invisible to the question author. If they've asked a bad question they're not given the feedback that they did something wrong so they aren't going to even try to fix it. When a bad question is closed, the author is informed of what they did wrong, given information on how to fix the problem, and given an incentive to actually care and to not just ignore the feedback (because the question can't be answered until they fix it).
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 17:54

@Servy Obviously, it would have to be fine tune. I was just citing up vote as one possible criteria. I'm trying to suggest a new way to moderate things. Instead of moderating by actively closing topics which I put under "negative" moderation, why not moderate by actively up voting questions/answers you think should be indexed by google? This would be "positive" moderation. It's a different philosophy.
– GudradainAug 3 '17 at 18:33

1

@Gudradain and how exactly would that result in a better quality SO? that would result in less low quality questions being deleted, and not more good quality questions being asked. it's a net-negative result.
– Kevin BAug 3 '17 at 18:44

@KevinB What does it change for you if a bad question is not deleted? It's not like it will show up in google results or SO search. You will never stumble upon it as it's just forgotten. We are using a moderation model where we are trying to remove all the sand from the desert instead of just extracting the pearls.
– GudradainAug 3 '17 at 18:55

1

@Gudradain New users will see it with an answer and assume those kinds of questions are wanted. it's a feedback loop of terrible questions. terrible questions aren't often forgotten, they're often instead wildly upvoted more often than not due to how easy it is to gain rep re-answering the same questions and typo questions over and over.
– Kevin BAug 3 '17 at 18:56

4

You're suggesting a form of moderation that just about every single site other than SO uses (namely, none). SO is so successful because of it's strict moderation. If you don't like strict moderation you only need to go literally any other Q/A site to get it.
– ServyAug 3 '17 at 18:58

...The post is making a point of calling out undermoderation. That is, we suffer from an acute lack of it.
– MakotoAug 3 '17 at 19:55